City Council Extends Aunt Fanny's Cabin Deadline After Outcry From Smyrna, Cobb Residents

SMYRNA, GA — Even though the future of Aunt Fanny's Cabin seemed dead earlier this month, Smyrna City Council members voted Monday to extend the proposal deadline for someone to buy and move the cabin until mid March.

At a Committee of the Whole work session last Thursday, council members all but finalized the decision to extend the deadline to 10 a.m. March 16. Monday's vote made the decision official.

City council members will vote on the bids or vote to demolish the dilapidated 19th century building during the March 21 meeting.

No bids were submitted before the original Feb. 1 deadline, but there was one possible applicant that said he's interested in preserving the cabin, but he just needed more time to craft an official proposal.

The 19th century cabin once housed a famous restaurant with a tangled racial background and was named after Fanny Williams, a Black woman who worked as a housekeeper for Smyrna's Campbell family.

Williams was also an early civil rights advocate in Cobb County and metro Atlanta, credited with raising money for the state's first all-Black hospital in Marietta.

Based on task force recommendations, council voted Dec. 20 to demolish the cabin due to its complicated past — the once-popular restaurant eventually became known for using derogatory depictions of Black people for entertainment — and high cost for renovation or preservation, after the city failed to properly maintain the building for years.

Council members left the proposal deadline open until Feb. 1, and received two proposals — but the one that grasped council members' attention was one from a man named Philip Ivester, who responded to the bid with a request for an extension.

Ivester is a preservationist who lives just outside the city limits, and has been involved with the Friends of the Concord Covered Bridge Historic District. He said he wants to move the cabin to his 11-acre property on Concord Road, but a builder who could help him move and restore it wasn't available until mid-February.

He also said he's been dealing with family medical issues, and the surge in COVID-19 cases between the Dec. 20 vote and Tuesday's deadline prevented him from meeting with other parties, the Marietta Daily Journal previously reported.

Regardless of what happens to the cabin, Norton and other council members have already committed to creating a proper memorial for Williams at the site of the existing cabin.

"No matter if you were for the cabin being saved or for it being demolished, or whatever you were for, everybody 100 percent was for memorializing Fanny Williams appropriately," Norton said last Thursday.

Demonstrators, members of the Cobb NAACP and the Coalition to Save Aunt Fanny's Cabin gathered the day before the original proposal deadline to call for the city to preserve the historic structure instead of demolishing it.

A few days later, Norton met with the Cobb NAACP president, Jeriene Bonner Grimes, to invite her to join a committee dedicated to preserving the history and legacy of Williams, the MDJ reported.

Related:

• Aunt Fanny's Cabin Proposal Deadline Extended: Smyrna Council
• Future Of Aunt Fanny's Cabin Up For Discussion, Again: Report
• Calls To Save Aunt Fanny's Cabin Come As Deadline Looms
• Aunt Fanny's Cabin To Be Demolished Unless Sold: City Council
• Fate Of Aunt Fanny's Cabin To Be Decided By City Council Monday
• Aunt Fanny's Cabin Could Be Repaired, Demolished Or Preserved